The proliferation of email volume today, in part, is due to its ease of use, especially because of its ease of use to facilitate and answer communications, inquiries, and messages. For example, if an email sender requests and answer regarding a particular topic or matter from an email receiver, an email is quickly prepared and instantly delivered to the email receiver. One benefit to email is that if the email receiver is unable to handle or answer the communication, they can quickly forward the original email to other email receivers for their input. This type of activity can continually branch out creating complex chains and strings of email receivers. Oftentimes, an email receiver somewhere in the email chain or string is able to answer or respond to the original communication or inquiry, but somewhere along the chain of subsequent emails the original email sender is accidentally omitted from the address list. In one instance, this can occur when a subsequent email sender selects “reply” instead of “reply to all.” In this instance the original email sender may be omitted from the addressee line. Thus, the response is never communicated back to the original sender.
For example, an employee receives an inquiry via email from a customer of the employee's company, but the employee doesn't readily have the answer. In this case, the employee may forward the original email inquiry to their boss who then responds with an answer to the inquiry. In this example, if the employee failed to forward the email response back to the customer, then the customer would not ever receive the response. When the original author fails to receive a final response to their inquiry, they must expend additional time and efforts to send a reminder email to the email receivers requesting the response that was never sent to them.